Month: March 2014

PtitSeb has been hard at work on a few exciting ports and he is releasing today XBMC for Pandora in a new fresh build. I was lamenting over the lack of proper video player front end a few weeks back, and now that XMBC is here my life is almost complete.

ED is regularly asking for the community feedback when it comes to several aspects of the upcoming DragonBox Pyra, and the logo is no exception. There are 4 directions being considered and while they kind of revolve around the same idea, they have different executions.

On top of Pandoralive, I am involved in a certain number of activities in my free time, and one of them is Hacker News Kansai (aka HN Kansai). HN Kansai was born from the desire to find and gather readers of Hacker News living the Kansai region of Japan (basically the Western area of Japan with Kobe, Kyoto and Osaka as major cities). As one of the 3 co-organizers (the other two being Paco and Sacha) of the event, I have been quite involved and I just wanted to share here about what we did about a month ago, since it gives a good insight as to what this event is about, and may interest a couple of folks from the Pandora community as well.

Luftrausers has been recently getting a lot of attention on Steam as it was released a couple of days ago on PC, Mac and Linux. At its core, it’s a retro-looking shooter where you have total freedom of movement, while being constantly attacked by hordes of WW2 planes and boats. So why am I talking about it ? Well, Luftrauser (without the S) was actually a flash game in the first place, and believe it or not, it’s very much the same game that’s now being sold on Steam.

I really haven’t been using Twitter much until now for PandoraLive. So far it’s automatically sending a post on the twitter feed every time a new article is published. But this is going to change, and you can expect to see some more info through the Twitter Feed that you just don’t get from the website.

Another week has passed, bringing us closer to the end of March. In Japan the cherry blossoms should be visible in a couple of weeks now, so it should not take long until everyone rushes outside to drink beer under the sakura trees. In the meantime, there were a bunch of updates on the repo, while very few new releases. Actually, only one. I know PtitSeb is still working on several projects in parallel so no doubt we’ll see some new stuff from him soon as well.

Back in the 1990s a series of articles covering the history of Sega were written and put up on a website called Eidolon’s Inn as its Segabase. This covered the early days of Sega up until midway through the Sega Dreamcast’s lifespan. Those articles have now been reedited and bound into book form and extended up until the death of the Dreamcast and the company’s refocussing as a multiplatform publisher and developer. As such the book covers a lot of Sega’s history, from its foundation by an American expat in Japan through its arcade and Genesis/MegaDrive glory days and its final hurrah with the Dreamcast and everything in between.

Last weekend I came back to Tokyo for a short visit. The main purpose of that short stay was to meet up with mmKALLL who happened to be there for a while, and to go together (with a couple of other friends from mine) in Akihabara to check stuff out. I knew most of the shops we went to, but there were a few interesting discoveries on the way…

Late last year, I wrote about Steam and their future towards Linux-based games and related hardware. Valve being a large actor in the digital distribution market, we could expect some additional movement and support from third parties, yet the beginning of 2014 had been relatively quiet. Until now. Several announcements were made recently that show signs of accelerating support for Linux in the gaming world. Holy Molly!

Yo guys. I have been a bit late for this update, since I was away for the weekend. Yeah, a man needs to get some rest sometimes. Actually, I did not get much rest, since I went to catch up with mmmkAlll in Tokyo as he was passing by. But more on that later. The previous week was a slow one for updates and releases, so it seems like the scene was just getting their act together not too put too much stress on my shoulders. Thanks a bunch !

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What’s This ?

GiantPockets (Previously Known as Pandoralive.info) is a blog dedicated to the Pocket Linux Handheld computers (such as the Open Pandora and the upcoming DragonBox Pyra, but also non-gaming handhelds like the GPD Pocket). These handhelds can be used for gaming but for a bunch of serious uses as they can run full Linux distributions and are typically equipped with physical keyboards. You will find here news regarding their latest software offering, hardware updates, development stories and testimonies of users.